Business

Labubus revealed the ‘new consumption’ trend among China’s Gen Z that’s now spreading overseas

Published

2 months ago

November 27, 2025

At the Fortune Global Forum in late October, the CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, the operator of the Chinese city’s stock exchange, shared an investor obsession.

“What is also emerging is a very interesting phenomenon, what we call ‘new consumption,’” Bonnie Chan told the audience. Her prime example? “This thing called Labubu.”

The ugly-cute doll, sold by Chinese toymaker and retailer Pop Mart, is the hottest item of 2025 and, as Chan mentioned, evidence of the new trend in Chinese consumers making emotionally driven purchases. Shoppers have queued up at Pop Mart outlets in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong to buy the dolls. Celebrities like Rihanna, Lisa, and Dua Lipa have been photographed with the toy hooked on their handbags. Tennis star Naomi Osaka has proudly touted her bejeweled, customized Labubu dolls on TV, naming them “Andre Swagassi” and “Billie Jean Bling.”

Pop Mart’s fortunes have swelled as Labubu dolls have sold out around the world. The Beijingheadquartered toy retailer, known for selling toys via “blind boxes,” reported 13 billion Chinese yuan in revenue ($1.9 billion) for the first six months of 2025, up more than 200% from the same period a year earlier. Profits have surged by even more: Pop Mart earned 4.5 billion yuan ($630 million) in net income, up almost 400%. Labubu alone made up a third of its sales. The global surge has been so strong, that even CEO Wang Ning has admitted he can’t accurately forecast how long it will last.

The toy store’s shares have surged over 125% since the beginning of 2025, making it one of the best-performing stocks on Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index. (Pop Mart joined the index in September.) Even after shares dropped 40% from their peak, Pop Mart’s $37 billion market cap is still worth as much as Hasbro, Mattel, and Sanrio combined. The stock surge also hiked the wealth of Pop Mart’s founder, Wang, who’s now worth $18 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Labubu hype will eventually fade, but Pop Mart clearly hopes its fortunes don’t fade with it. What may be longer lasting is the consumption trend behind Labubu: The Chinese intellectual property and local brands beloved by this generation of Chinese shoppers are gaining traction outside of China, finally cementing the world’s second largest economy as a global cultural powerhouse.

Wang Ning, born in 1987, started Pop Mart in 2010, after a brief stint working in China’s tech sector. The first outlet was in Zhongguancun, a neighborhood in Beijing known for its tech companies. Wang has cited Japan’s gachapon vending machines—stations where children turn a dial to receive a small toy at random—as well as Hong Kong’s Log-on retail chain of variety stores, as inspirations for Pop Mart.

There’s an element of chance at Pop Mart, too. Customers don’t buy toys outright. Instead, they buy a blind box that contains a mystery toy, say, a Labubu doll. Some variants are rarer than others. It’s a business model that pushes customers to try their luck, perhaps multiple times, to get their hands on a rarer doll. And it’s tailor-made for social media, as creators leverage the mystery to attract followers.

Pop Mart got its start capitalizing on the IP of brands like Disney but has since designed its own toys.

Li Peiyun—VCG/Getty Images

Early on, Pop Mart sold toys based on IP from companies like Disney. But it soon pivoted to selling toys based on designs that it owned outright. “Molly,” a series of wide-eyed girl figurines designed by Hong Kong artist Kenny Wong, was Pop Mart’s first big hit. Then came Labubu, the brainchild of another Hong Kong artist, Kasing Lung, who developed the creature in 2015 as part of “The Monsters,” a series inspired by Nordic folklore.

“First Pop Mart identifies an IP, then it turns this IP into a culture moment, then it builds a media ecosystem to boost it,” says Ashley Dudarenok, founder of ChoZan, a consultancy that helps foreign brands market themselves in China. “They’re more like cultural anthropologists than toymakers.”

Pop Mart is embarking on rapid global expansion, with over 570 stores in Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. It generates 40% of its revenue outside of Greater China, up from less than 25% a year ago.

Over the summer, analysts tied the Labubu craze to a trend spreading among China’s youth: “emotional” or “new” consumption. The idea is that young urban shoppers, frustrated by limited career options and social mobility, are spending on hobbies and small pleasures, rather than on big-ticket items like a home.

Pop Mart is not the only one to benefit. Laopu Gold, a Chinese jewelry chain, is up over 150% for the year. Mao Geping, a cosmetics brand, is up 57%.

Labubu is the creation of Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung.

Li Zhihua—China News Service/VCG/Getty Images

“It’s the discretionary shopping that’s creating this booming consumption scene in China, because that’s where people can really express their personality,” notes Amber Zhang, a partner at Chinese research firm BigOne Lab.

In the past, shoppers might have bought a foreign brand; they now favor domestic ones that better align with their cultural values. “People are buying them because they feel like: ‘Hey, this is a great statement of my personality, and it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t have a [foreign] logo on it,’” says Zhang.

China, despite its size and rich history, has punched below its weight in global culture. Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, are global cultural powerhouses—Japan with anime and video games; Korea with dramas, pop music, and cosmetics.

But now the affordable treasures that Chinese consumers are clamoring for are finding audiences outside the mainland, too. Chinese video games, like miHoYo’s Genshin Impact and Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong, have attracted global fan bases, with the latter setting player count records.

Ne Zha 2, an animated film from Chinese studio Beijing Enlight Pictures, is this year’s top grossing film globally, winning almost $2 billion at the box office (with the vast majority of sales in China).

Cheng Lu, CEO of CreateAI, a Chinese generative AI platform for animation and video games, says lower costs allow Chinese producers to “have more content out there.”

Chinese drink brands are also dipping into overseas markets. Luckin Coffee, bubble tea brand Chagee, and ice cream chain Mixue are all expanding into Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the U.S.

Even Chinese cosmetics are starting to elbow into a space dominated by Japanese and Korean brands, thanks to affordable products and aggressive digital marketing. “You know how crazy social media is in China?” Malina Ngai, CEO of Hong Kong– based health and beauty retail chain AS Watson, told Fortune in September. “When they go outside of China, they immediately surpass a lot of the brands when it comes to social media, storytelling, and endorsements.”

“They’re more like cultural anthropologists than toymakers.”
Ashley Dudarenok, Founder of consultancy ChoZan, on Pop Mart’s retail savvy

Zhang isn’t surprised by China’s rising global prominence. “China now has this huge population base who are both rooted in China but also exposed to the global market,” she says, pointing to the many Chinese who have lived, worked, and attended school overseas. “They know how China works, and they know how the world works, and they have this opportunity to create and combine something that can resonate not just with Chinese people, but also a broader audience.”

Labubu mania has come down from its summertime frenzy. Investors are wary of declining secondary market prices for the dolls, a sign of dwindling popularity. They’re clearly jumpy. In early November, Chinese media shared a surreptitiously livestreamed conversation with a Pop Mart salesperson who said the company’s blind boxes are overpriced. Pop Mart lost almost $2.2 billion in market value that day.

Still, some analysts are hopeful that Pop Mart is more than just Labubu. “We believe Pop Mart is still in a growth stage of taking its IP products global, and that its relevant peers should be top global IP companies, such as Lego, Sanrio, and Jellycat,” HSBC analysts wrote in late October, dismissing parallels to the Beanie Baby bubble of the 1990s.

“The question now is, can Pop Mart—beyond Labubu, beyond Molly— make the transition into being a lifestyle?” Dudarenok asks. Pop Mart is experimenting with movies and has a theme park, but, she says, it’s unclear if the company can make a majority of its revenue from “lifestyle”—and not depend quite so much on a fuzzy, grinning yeti-like toy.

This article appears in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Behind Labubu Mania.”

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Business

On Netflix’s earnings call, co-CEOs can’t quell fears about the Warner Bros. bid

Published

2 hours ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

When it comes to creating irresistible storylines, Netflix, the home of Stranger Things and The Crown, is second to none. And as the streaming video giant delivered its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, executives were in top storytelling form, pitching what they promise will be a smash hit: the acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery.

The company’s co-CEOs, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, said the deal, which values Warner Brothers Discovery at $83 billion, will accelerate its own core streaming business while helping it expand into TV and the theatrical film business.

“This is an exciting time in the business. Lots of innovation, lots of competition,” Sarandos enthused on Tuesday’s earnings conference call. Netflix has a history of successful transformation and of pivoting opportunistically, he reminded the audience: Once upon a time, its main business entailed mailing DVDs in red envelopes to customers’ homes.

Despite Sarandos’ confident delivery, however, the pitch didn’t land with investors. The company’s stock, which was already down 15% since Netflix announced the deal in early December, sank another 4.9% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Netflix’s financial results for the final quarter of 2025 were fine. The company beat EPS expectations by a penny, and said it now has 325 million paid subscribers and a worldwide total audience nearing 1 billion. Its 2026 revenue outlook, of between $50.7 billion and $51.7 billion, was right on target.

Still, investors are worried that the Warner Bros. deal will force Netflix to compete outside its lane, causing management to lose focus. The fact that Netflix will temporarily halt its share buybacks in order to accumulate cash to help finance the deal, as it disclosed towards the bottom of Tuesday’s shareholder letter, probably didn’t help matters.

And given that there’s a rival offer for Warner Bros from Paramount Skydance, it’s not unreasonable for investors to worry that Netflix may be forced into an expensive bidding war. (Even though Warner Brothers Discovery has accepted the Netflix offer over Paramount’s, no one believes the story is over—not even Netflix, which updated its $27.75 per share offer to all-cash, instead of stock and cash, hours earlier on Tuesday in order to provide WBD shareholders with “greater value certainty.”)

Investors are wary; will regulators balk?

Warner Brothers investors are not the only audience that Netflix needs to win over. The deal must be blessed by antitrust regulators—a prospect whose outcome is harder to predict than ever in the Trump administration.

Sarandos and Peters laid out the case Tuesday for why they believe the deal will get through the regulatory process, framing the deal as a boon for American jobs.

“This is going to allow us to significantly expand our production capacity in the U.S. and to keep investing in original content in the long term, which means more opportunities for creative talent and more jobs,” Sarandos said.

Referring to Warner Brothers’ television and film businesses, he added that “these folks have extensive experience and expertise. We want them to stay on and run those businesses. We’re expanding content creation not collapsing it.”

It’s a compelling story. But the co-CEOs may have neglected to study the most important script of all when it comes to getting government approval in the current administration; they forgot to recite the Trump lines.

The example has been set over the past 12 months by peers such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The latter, with his company facing various federal regulatory threats, began publicly praising the Trump administration on an earnings call last January.

And Nvidia’s Huang has already seen real dividends from a similar strategy. The chip company CEO has praised Trump repeatedly on earnings calls, in media interviews, and in conference keynote speeches, calling him “America’s unique advantage” in AI. Since then, the U.S. ban on selling Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to China has been rescinded. The praise may have been coincidental to the outcome, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

In contrast, the president went unmentioned on Tuesday’s call. How significant Netflix’s omission of a Trump call-out turns out to be remains to be seen; maybe it won’t matter at all. But it’s worth noting that its competitor for Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance, is helmed by David Ellison, an outspoken Trump supporter.

It’s a storyline that Netflix should have seen coming, and itmay still send the company back to rewrite.

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Americans are paying nearly all of the tariff burden as international exports die down, study finds

Published

4 hours ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

After nearly a year of promises tariffs would boost the U.S. economy while other countries footed the bill, a new study shows almost all of the tariff burden is falling on American consumers.

Americans are paying 96% of the costs of tariffs as prices for goods rise, according to research published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank.

In April 2025 when President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, he claimed: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.” But the report suggests tariffs have actually cost Americans more money.

Trump has long used tariffs as leverage in non-trade political disputes. Over the weekend, Trump renewed his trade war in Europe after Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland sent troops for training exercises in Greenland. The countries will be hit with a 10% tariff starting on Feb. 1 that is set to rise to 25% on June 1, if a deal for the U.S. to buy Greenland is not reached.

On Monday, Trump threatened a 200% tariff on French wine, after French President Emmanuel Macron refused to join Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza, which has a $1 billion buy-in for permanent membership.

“The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth,” wrote Julian Hinz, research director at the Kiel Institute and an author of the study. “The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill.”

The research shows export prices stayed the same, but the volume has collapsed. After imposing a 50% tariff on India in August, exports to the U.S. dropped 18% to 24%, compared to the European Union, Canada, and Australia. Exporters are redirecting sales to other markets, so they don’t need to cut sales or prices, according to the study.

“There is no such thing as foreigners transferring wealth to the U.S. in the form of tariffs,” Hinz told The Wall Street Journal.

For the study, Hinz and his team analyzed more than 25 million shipment records between January 2024 through November 2025 that were worth nearly $4 trillion.They found exporters absorbed just 4% of the tariff burden and American importers are largely passing on the costs to consumers.

Tariffs have increased customs revenue by $200 billion, but nearly all of that comes from American consumers. The study’s authors likened this to a consumption tax as wealth transfers from consumers and businesses to the U.S. Treasury.

Trump has also repeatedly claimed tariffs would boost American manufacturing, butthe economy has shown declines in manufacturing jobs every month since April 2025, losing 60,000 manufacturing jobs between Liberation Day and November.

The Supreme Court was expected to rule as soon as today on whether Trump’s use of emergency powers to levy tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was legal. The court initially announced they planned to rule last week and gave no explanation for the delay.

Although justices appeared skeptical of the administration’s authority during oral arguments in November, economists predict the Trump administration will find alternative ways to keep the tariffs.

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Business

Selling America is a ‘dangerous bet,’ UBS CEO warns as markets panic

Published

5 hours ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Investors are “selling America” in spades Tuesday: The 10-year Treasury yield is at its highest point since August; the U.S. dollar slid; and the traditional safe-haven metal investments—gold and silver—surged once again to record highs.

The CEO of UBS Group, the world’s largest private bank, thinks this market is making a “dangerous bet.”

“Diversifying away from America is impossible,” UBS Group CEO Sergio Ermotti told Bloomberg in a television interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday. “Things can change rapidly, and the U.S. is the strongest economy in the world, the one who has the highest level of innovation right now.”

The catalyst for the selloff was fresh escalation from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened a 10% tariff on eight European allies—including Germany, France, and the U.K.—unless they cede to his demands to acquire Greenland.

Trump also threatened a 200% tariff on French wine and Champagne to pressure French President Emmanuel Macron to join his Board of Peace. Trump’s favorite “Mr. Tariff” is back, and bond investors are unhappy with the volatility.

But if investors keep getting caught up in the volatility of day-to-day politics and shun the U.S., they’ll miss the forest for the trees, Ermotti argued. While admitting the current environment is “bumpy,” he pointed to a statistic: Last year alone, the U.S. created 25 million new millionaires. For a wealth manager like UBS, that is 1,000 new millionaires a day. To shun that level of innovation in U.S. equities for gold would be a reactionary move that ignores the long-term innovation of the U.S. economy.

“We see two big levers: First of all, wealth creation, GDP growth, innovation, and also more idiosyncratic to UBS is that we see potential for us to become more present, increase our market share,” Ermotti said.

But if something doesn’t give in the standoff between the European Union and Trump, there could be potential further de-dollarization, this time, from Europe selling its U.S. bonds, George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note Sunday. Indeed, on Tuesday, Danish pension funds sold $100 million in U.S. Treasuries, allegedly owing to “poor” U.S. finances, though the pension fund’s chief said of the debacle over Greenland: “Of course, that didn’t make it more difficult to take the decision.”

Europe owns twice as many U.S. bonds and equities as the rest of the world combined. If the rest of Europe follows Denmark’s lead, that could be an $8 trillion market at risk, Saravelos argued.

“In an environment where the geo-economic stability of the Western alliance is being disrupted existentially, it is not clear why Europeans would be as willing to play this part,” he wrote.

Back in the U.S., the markets also sold off as the Nasdaq and S&P both fell 2% Tuesday, already shedding the entirety of Greenland’s value on Trump’s threats, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers noted. Analysts and investors are uneasy, given the history of Trump declaring a stark tariff before negotiating with the country to take it down, also known as the “TACO”—Trump always chickens out—effect. Investors have been “burnt before by overreacting to tariff threats,” Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank noted. That’s a similar stance to the UBS bank chief: If you react too much to headlines, you’ll miss the great innovation that’s pushed the stock market to record highs for the past three years.

“I wouldn’t really bet against the U.S.,” he said.

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